A UNIVERSITY in the north of England is helping past pupils of a Dolgellau school relive their past.

A sound technologist from the University of Huddersfield has restored vintage tapes for the Old Girls’ Association of Dolgellau’s Dr Williams’ School in Wales.

Music expert Ben Evans is used to working with the very latest equipment, but when he took part in an audio history project that involved decades-old tapes and cassettes he found it an absorbing experience, akin to opening an “acoustic time capsule”.

Now he has been told that some of the people whose school days were captured on the original recordings have been “moved to tears” by his painstaking digitisations.

It began when the Heritage Lottery Fund backed a project to create an online archive documenting Dr Williams’ School, in Dolgellau.

When it opened in 1878 it was a pioneer of secondary education for girls in Wales.

It closed in 1975, but its Old Girls’ Association decided to create a website telling the school’s story in words, pictures and sound.

Among the archival material were a substantial number of tapes from the 60s and 70s, recordings of events such as school assemblies and carol concerts.

Read the full story in this week’s Meirionnydd edition of the Cambrian News